Custodianship Question in America Australia, New Zealand Europe Asia Canada, Latin America, Africa
Different groups may have different interests, but all groups want custody of their own sacred stories.
After Jews consolidated their position in the American History profession in the 1950s through the universalist consensus framework, the next generation used a different strategy: not performed universalism but performed identification with another excluded group, writing Black history from the inside while being White and Jewish. This is the consensus school’s distancing mechanism in reverse: instead of claiming to be beyond particularity, they claimed instead a deep identification with a different particularity.
Alliance Theory provides a precise account of how belief systems function as coalition technologies rather than as intellectual commitments. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton argue that political belief systems are not coherent philosophical positions derived from abstract values but are instead collections of propagandistic biases applied to whoever one’s current allies and rivals happen to be. When you map this onto the history of American historical scholarship, the consensus interpretation that historian Peter Novick (1934-2012) documents in That Noble Dream becomes analytically transparent in a way that previous accounts left murky.
Novick shows that some assimilated Jewish historians disproportionately championed the consensus interpretation, with its emphasis on shared American values and the absence of fundamental class or ethnic conflict, as a strategy of self-advancement in the guise of truth-seeking. Alliance Theory explains why this was not only strategic calculation but was experienced as intellectual conviction. The propagandistic biases Pinsof and company describe, perpetrator biases that minimize one’s allies’ transgressions, victim biases that embellish one’s allies’ grievances, attributional biases that credit allies’ successes to internal virtues and failures to external circumstances, are not always consciously deployed. Rather, they are automatic operations of the alliance psychology, which means the historians who championed the consensus interpretation experienced themselves as doing objective scholarship rather than coalition maintenance.
The transitivity criterion is particularly illuminating for the history department case. David Pinsof argues that people favor allies who share their allies and rivals, because transitivity minimizes infighting and betrayal. When Jewish historians entered the American historical profession in the postwar period, the most natural coalition available was the liberal mainline Protestant establishment that was simultaneously dominant in the profession and converging with Jewish intellectuals on civil rights, universalism, and the repudiation of ethnic nationalism. The transitivity logic predicts exactly what Novick documents, that Jewish historians would adopt the political and intellectual positions of this coalition and that the coalition would gradually incorporate Jewish members as it became clear that Jewish historians shared the coalition’s allies and rivals. The convergence was not random. It was the predictable output of the alliance psychology operating on the specific opportunity structure that the postwar American academy presented.
The perpetrator bias illuminates the specific intellectual positions that characterized the Jewish contribution to American historiography. Novick documents that Jewish historians were notably unsympathetic to the Populists, reading their movement through the lens of shtetl memory about peasant pogroms rather than through the lens of democratic aspiration. The Populists were rivals of the urban commercial and professional class with which Jewish intellectuals were allied. The perpetrator bias therefore applied automatically, making it natural to see the Populists’ anti-semitic dimensions as central rather than peripheral, and to read the entire movement through the frame of the threat it posed to the coalition’s interests. The historians involved were not consciously distorting history. They were applying the propagandistic biases of their alliance psychology to historical material in the way Alliance Theory predicts.
The victim bias mechanism reveals the specifically Jewish contribution to what later became the multicultural historiography of the 1960s and beyond. The shift from the consensus interpretation to the new social history, with its emphasis on recovering the voices of the excluded and the marginalized, reflects the operation of victim biases applied to new allies as the coalition structure of American liberalism was restructured by the civil rights movement. When Black Americans, women, and other marginalized groups became central allies of the liberal coalition, the victim bias automatically generated the historical interpretive framework that embellished their grievances, emphasized the severity and duration of the harms inflicted on them, and attributed those harms to the personal moral failings of the out-group (conservative white Christian men) rather than to structural or contingent factors. Alliance Theory predicts that this shift would produce the double standards that conservative critics of the new social history identified, the same historians who were skeptical of Populist grievances becoming enthusiastic champions of Black grievances, applying different evidentiary standards depending on whose cause was evaluated.
What Alliance Theory adds that Stephen Turner’s framework does not fully provide is the specific cognitive architecture by which this sorting operates. Stephen Turner explains that convenient beliefs are coalition maintenance devices and that going beyond them is unprofitable. Pinsof explains the specific psychological mechanisms, perpetrator biases, victim biases, attributional biases, transitivity tracking, similarity assessment, that convert the abstract coalition maintenance function into specific intellectual positions. This is the individual-level causal story that Turner’s account gestures at but does not fully develop. Turner tells you that the system produces convenient beliefs and why. Pinsof tells you how the individual mind generates them through automatic operations that feel like reasoning.
Applied to the History and English departments of the 1920s and 1930s, this means the exclusion of Jews was experienced by WASP gatekeepers as a continuous series of particular judgments that felt locally justified. The candidate’s prose lacked a certain quality. His sensibility seemed external to the material. His engagement with American literature carried a faint note of the observer rather than the inheritor. These judgments were not fabricated; they were real perceptions, produced by the reality that a Jewish scholar trained in immigrant households, yeshivas, CCNY seminars, and the radical intellectual culture of the Lower East Side did approach Emerson or Parkman from a different position than someone whose grandfather had read the same texts in the same institutions. The tacit formation was different, and the established practitioners could feel the difference even when they could not articulate it without embarrassment.
Turner’s framework makes sense of something that the simple prejudice narrative struggles to explain: why the choosers experienced themselves as acting in good faith. E.G. Boring was not lying when he worried about whether a Jewish candidate’s personality was suitable for a department. He reported a perception produced by a tacit formation that had built into it the assumption that certain social and intellectual dispositions were markers of competence rather than markers of class and ethnicity. The tragedy Turner’s framework illuminates is that the perception was both right and wrong in its interpretation: right because the difference in formation was real, wrong because the conclusion drawn was that the different formation was inferior rather than merely different.
The meaning side of this is where Turner’s account becomes particularly rich. When Jewish scholars entered History and English departments in significant numbers after 1945, what the existing practitioners lost was not just market share in a competition for positions. They lost the coherence of their own practice. Before the entry of Jewish scholars, the tacit formation of the Anglo-Protestant tradition could proceed unreflectively. You cannot execute a habitual practice while simultaneously examining it; the examination interrupts the execution. The presence of scholars formed by a different tradition forced a kind of meta-awareness onto practices that had previously been invisible to themselves. Suddenly the question arose of what distinguished a correct reading from an incorrect one, what the criteria of historical significance were, whether the canon was a natural formation or a selection. These questions had been dormant not because practitioners were stupid but because the homogeneity of formation had made them unnecessary.
This is the source of the particular anguish that Turner’s framework helps name. It was not simply that the Protestant literary scholar lost a job to a Jewish competitor. It was that his entire way of practicing the discipline became visible to him as a way rather than as the way. The tacit formation, once exposed to the friction of an alternative formation, lost its quality of being correct perception and became instead one tradition among others, requiring justification it had never previously needed. The hero system that Ernest Becker would identify as protecting practitioners from mortality terror was simultaneously an intellectual formation that Turner would identify as a tacit practice, and both were destabilized by the same event: the arrival and then increasing dominance of people who felt strange and threatening.
Turner also writes about what happens when practices that depend on shared tacit formation are opened to people with different formations, and the answer is that the practice changes in ways that feel to the original practitioners like corruption. This is not false consciousness. The WASP New Critics who built mid-century English departments did share something that was lost as the field opened and diversified: a particular way of reading closely, a set of intuitions about what literary complexity meant, a common set of authors and texts whose mastery could be assumed. The Jewish scholars who entered in the 1940s and 1950s brought different intuitions formed by different texts and different social experiences, and over time those intuitions reshaped literary scholarship. The Theory Wars of the 1970s and 1980s were partly a continuation of this process, and the Protestant practitioners who experienced those wars as a destruction of literary culture were not wrong that something was being destroyed.
The custodianship question sits at the center of all this. Turner’s tacit knowledge framework explains why guardianship felt not like a power interest but like a responsibility. The practitioners of American literary history believed, and experienced as obvious, that understanding American literature required being formed in a particular way, and that the national story was something you inhabited rather than something you studied from outside. This belief was not arbitrary; it had a epistemological basis in that tacit practices are transmitted through formation rather than through explicit instruction, and that the formation shapes what you perceive. The error was not the belief that formation matters but the belief that only one formation could produce legitimate and exclusive practitioners.
What Turner adds beyond Becker is precision about the loss. Becker tells you that the hero system was threatened and that threat produces terror and aggression. Turner tells you what was threatened and why the threat was experienced as epistemological rather than merely social. The practitioners were not simply protecting status. They were protecting what felt to them like life itself: the shared tacit background against which judgments could be made, canons maintained, and excellence recognized. That background required a community of practitioners sufficiently similar in formation to generate the mutual recognition and shared perception that tacit practice depends on. Jewish entry did not just change the distribution of positions; it changed the conditions under which the practice could be conducted in the way it had been conducted, which meant it changed the practice, which meant something that had felt like perception became visibly interpretation, and something that had felt like culture became a culture.
The grief this produced was genuine, and Turner’s framework allows you to take it seriously without vindicating the exclusion that tried to prevent it. You can hold simultaneously that the tacit formation was real, that its disruption was experienced as loss rather than merely disadvantage, that the loss was not imaginary, and that the claim to institutional guardianship based on that formation was contingent. Turner gives you the tools to make all four of those statements without collapsing them into each other, which is more than either the simple antisemitism narrative or the simple meritocracy narrative can do.
Alliance Theory illuminates the Jewish entry into English departments, and it adds dimensions that neither the Klingenstein assimilation narrative, the Novick coalition maintenance account, nor the Turner convenient beliefs framework fully captures on their own.
Start with the most fundamental contribution, which is the reframing of the entry story.
Klingenstein tells the story as one of individual Jewish scholars seeking entry into an established tradition and paying specific assimilation costs in the process. Turner might tell it as a story of coalition maintenance, with convenient beliefs functioning as the price of admission to institutional positions. Alliance Theory adds specific criteria of similarity, transitivity, and interdependence, and this reframing is analytically more precise because it explains not just that the entry happened but why it took the form it did and why it produced the intellectual positions it produced.
The similarity criterion explains the initial coalition formation between Jewish intellectuals and the specific wing of the WASP literary establishment that was most open to their entry. The New York intellectuals who moved from the immigrant Jewish culture of the Lower East Side into the American literary establishment did not assimilate into the whole of the WASP literary culture. They formed alliances with the specific segment of that culture that shared enough of their intellectual formation to make coordination possible. The shared reference points were the European modernist tradition, the engagement with Freudian psychology, the skepticism about received cultural authority, and the specific form of secular intellectual seriousness that both groups cultivated. These similarities made alliance formation natural between the assimilated Jewish intellectuals and the secular modernist wing of the WASP literary establishment, while the distance remained greater with the Christian and traditionalist wings represented by figures like T.S. Eliot and the Southern Agrarians.
The transitivity criterion explains several features of the Jewish entry that the other frameworks leave underspecified. Pinsof argues that people favor allies who share their allies and rivals because transitivity minimizes infighting and betrayal. When Jewish intellectuals entered the literary academic establishment in the postwar period, the most important transitivity question was whether their natural allies, the secular modernist liberal wing of the WASP establishment, and their natural rivals, the more explicitly Christian and culturally conservative wing, were already positioned on opposite sides of the relevant intellectual and institutional conflicts. They were. The New Critics at Yale and the Southern Agrarians were simultaneously the most resistant to Jewish intellectual entry and the most committed to specifically Anglo-Protestant cultural formation as the foundation of literary judgment. The liberal wing associated with figures like Lionel Trilling’s colleagues at Columbia and the Partisan Review circle was simultaneously the most open to Jewish intellectual participation and the most skeptical of any claim that literary value required specific religious or ethnic formation. The transitivity of these alignments made the coalition structure self-reinforcing.
The interdependence criterion illuminates the specific form of mutual benefit that made the coalition between Jewish intellectuals and the liberal WASP literary establishment stable and productive. Jewish intellectuals brought to the coalition specific intellectual gifts such as the outsider’s defamiliarizing vision, the hermeneutical sophistication developed through centuries of Talmudic commentary, the moral urgency rooted in the prophetic tradition, the sociological sensitivity to the gap between official cultural ideology and social function. The liberal WASP establishment brought to the coalition institutional access, professional legitimacy, and the cultural authority of insiders who could vouch for Jewish intellectuals in ways that the Jewish intellectuals could not vouch for themselves. The interdependence was genuine and it made the coalition more stable than either party’s calculations of self-interest alone would have produced.
The perpetrator bias explains the specific critical positions that Klingenstein documents. People apply perpetrator biases to their allies, downplaying their allies’ transgressions and emphasizing mitigating circumstances. In the literary academic context, the relevant transgressions are the antisemitism, the exclusion, and the specific forms of cultural gatekeeping that the WASP literary establishment had historically practiced. The Jewish intellectuals who entered the establishment did not simply ignore this history. They engaged with it, but in a specific way that reflects the perpetrator bias operating in a complex direction. The established scholars and critics who sponsored Jewish intellectual entry, figures like Mark Van Doren at Columbia and the editors of Partisan Review who were themselves partially Jewish, were the allies whose transgressions needed to be managed. The perpetrator bias produced a tendency to distinguish between the good wing of the establishment, the secular modernist liberal sponsors who were opening the doors, and the bad wing, the explicitly Christian traditionalists who were keeping them closed, and to apply the perpetrator bias generously to the former while applying the victim bias fully to the latter.
This explains something that Klingenstein describes but does not fully account for, which is the specific way that Jewish literary scholars engaged with the antisemitism embedded in canonical texts. The engagement was not consistent. Jewish scholars were considerably more willing to bracket the antisemitism of writers who were identified with the modernist experimental tradition, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, than to bracket the antisemitism of writers who were identified with the conservative cultural tradition. The asymmetry reflects the operation of the perpetrator and victim biases along coalition lines. Eliot and Pound were claimed by the coalition that included Jewish scholars. Their antisemitism was therefore managed through the perpetrator bias, contextualized as a regrettable peripheral feature of otherwise important achievements. The antisemitism of more explicitly conservative or Christian writers was not similarly contextualized because those writers were not coalition allies.
Harold Bloom’s explicit hostility to Eliot is the exception that proves this rule. Bloom refused the coalition’s management of Eliot’s antisemitism because his specific intellectual formation, rooted in the Jewish kabbalistic tradition and in what he understood as a specifically Jewish aesthetics of the sublime, put him in more direct competition with Eliot’s claim to define the canon than most of his contemporaries. Bloom experienced Eliot not as a problematic ally to be managed but as a rival whose claim to cultural authority threatened his own. The victim bias therefore operated fully in Bloom’s reading of Eliot rather than being modulated by the perpetrator bias that characterized most of his contemporaries’ engagement with the same figure. Alliance Theory predicts exactly this variation. The operation of the propagandistic biases depends on the specific alliance structure of the individual scholar, not on any uniform Jewish response to the canonical tradition.
People apply victim biases to their allies, embellishing their grievances and attributing their disadvantages to external causes rather than internal ones. As the coalition structure of the liberal literary establishment expanded through the 1960s and 1970s to incorporate new allies, women, Black Americans, gay people, working class writers, postcolonial intellectuals, the victim bias automatically generated the intellectual frameworks that would embellish these groups’ grievances, recover their marginalized voices, and attribute their historical exclusion from the canonical tradition to the moral failings of the tradition’s custodians rather than to any features of the excluded groups themselves.
Jewish scholars who had experienced exclusion from the canonical tradition and who had developed, through the hermeneutics of survival, a specific sensitivity to the operation of exclusionary cultural authority, were natural allies of other groups who were making equivalent claims of exclusion. The transitivity of the alliance structure pulled Jewish literary scholars toward these new coalitions because the new coalitions’ rivals, the defenders of the traditional canon and the traditional criteria of literary value, were the same rivals that Jewish scholars had been navigating since their entry into the academy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend is transitivity logic operating in the specific institutional context of the American literary academy.
People apply attributional biases to their allies, crediting their allies’ successes to internal virtues and their failures to external circumstances. In the literary academic context this maps onto the debate about literary value and the canon. The Jewish intellectuals and their allies who were challenging the traditional canon applied the attributional bias in a specific direction. The canonical tradition’s historical exclusion of women, minorities, and non-Western writers was attributed to the tradition’s internal moral failures, its racism, its sexism, its Eurocentrism, its class bias, rather than to any features of the excluded texts or traditions. Simultaneously, the achievements of the excluded traditions were attributed to their internal virtues rather than to the specific social and institutional conditions that had shaped them.
The theoretical frameworks that Jewish intellectuals helped develop and transmit into the American literary academy, deconstruction from Derrida, psychoanalytic criticism from Freud and Lacan, cultural materialism from the Frankfurt School, all served the alliance’s specific interests by providing systematic methodological tools for applying these attributional biases to the canonical tradition. Deconstruction revealed that the tradition’s claims to universal value concealed specific power operations. Psychoanalytic criticism revealed that the tradition’s aesthetic achievements were inseparable from the psychological formations that produced them, including the repressions and exclusions. Cultural materialism revealed that the tradition’s cultural authority was a product of specific social arrangements rather than of transcendent aesthetic achievement. Each of these methodological innovations served the alliance’s propagandistic function of delegitimizing the rivals’ claims to cultural authority while legitimizing the allies’ competing claims.
Alliance Theory says that small variations in initial social conditions feed on each other and snowball into seemingly arbitrary alliance structures. The specific form that the Jewish intellectual contribution to American literary studies took was not fully determined by the structural position of Jewish scholars in the academy or by the specific intellectual gifts that the Jewish formation provided. It was shaped by contingent early alliances that then became self-reinforcing. The specific alliance between the Partisan Review circle and the Columbia English department. The specific mentorship relationships that connected immigrant Jewish intellectual culture to the postwar academic establishment. The specific moment of entry, the postwar period when the GI Bill was expanding university enrollments and creating new academic positions that were more open to Jewish applicants than the older established chairs. The specific intellectual climate of the postwar moment, shaped by the Holocaust and by the anti-communist consensus, that made certain kinds of universalist liberal criticism both intellectually available and institutionally rewarded.
Each of these contingent early conditions shaped the subsequent trajectory of Jewish intellectual participation in American literary studies in ways that became self-reinforcing through the similarity, transitivity, and interdependence mechanisms. Once Jewish intellectuals were established in specific institutional positions with specific intellectual commitments, new Jewish scholars entering the academy found that the most available alliances were with the established Jewish scholars and with the coalition the established scholars had already built. The transitivity logic then pulled new entrants toward the intellectual positions that the existing coalition had already staked out, because those positions defined what it meant to be a good ally to the existing coalition members.
This explains something that neither the Klingenstein nor the Novick account fully addresses, which is the speed and comprehensiveness of the theoretical revolution in literary studies from the late 1960s onward. Alliance Theory predicts that once a coalition gains sufficient institutional presence to reward intellectual conformity within its framework and punish deviation from it, the alliance structure becomes self-reinforcing at an accelerating rate. The academic job market becomes organized around the coalition’s intellectual positions. Graduate training instills the coalition’s methodological commitments as the natural and obvious approach to literary study. Publication in prestigious journals requires demonstrating command of the coalition’s theoretical framework. The perpetrator and victim biases are applied to the coalition’s rivals, delegitimizing alternative approaches as politically suspect rather than merely intellectually different. The result is the rapid theoretical monoculture that characterized American literary studies from the 1980s onward, which is exactly what such a coalition will produce once it achieves sufficient institutional dominance.
The Kevin MacDonald Culture of Critique framework, which is the literary studies equivalent of Intolerance Theory in Political Science, argues that Jewish intellectuals pursued a coordinated strategy of ethnic hostility to Anglo-Protestant culture. Alliance Theory argues instead that Jewish intellectuals, like all coalition members, applied propagandistic biases symmetrically to their allies and rivals, and that what looked like a coordinated ethnic strategy was the predictable output of alliance psychology operating on a specific institutional structure. David Pinsof’s evidence that people exhibit equal levels of hostility to their rivals regardless of whether they are liberals or conservatives applies here. Jewish literary scholars were not applying a uniquely Jewish form of hostility to the Christian canonical tradition. They were applying the standard biases of coalition members to the specific rivals they encountered in the specific institutional context of the American literary academy.
The most important single thing Alliance Theory adds to the understanding of Jewish entry into American elite English departments is the explanation of why the intellectual positions associated with that entry were experienced as scholarly convictions rather than as coalition maintenance. Pinsof argues that biases are automatic operations of the alliance psychology, not conscious strategic calculations. The Jewish scholars who applied the victim bias to marginalized literary traditions and the perpetrator bias to the canonical tradition were not consciously performing coalition service. They were doing what their alliance psychology automatically generated when applied to the specific intellectual material of literary scholarship. The deconstructor who revealed the power operations concealed in canonical texts was not consciously serving the coalition’s interests. She was following the intellectual implications of the theoretical framework she had been trained in, a framework that had been developed and transmitted through a specific alliance structure but that had become the natural and obvious way of reading texts for everyone formed within that structure.
This is the Robert Trivers self-deception mechanism operating in the specific institutional context of the literary academy. The propagandistic function of the theoretical frameworks was invisible to their practitioners because the frameworks had been internalized as the natural way of doing literary scholarship rather than as the coalition’s specific tools for delegitimizing its rivals. Turner’s convenient beliefs framework explains why going beyond these frameworks was unprofitable and therefore rare. David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory explains how the frameworks were generated in the first place and why they felt like intellectual commitments rather than coalition service. The two frameworks together produce a more complete account of the Jewish intellectual contribution to American literary studies than either provides alone, and that combined account is more honest and more precise than anything the mainstream narrative about the democratization of the literary canon has produced.
The comparison between the Jewish sections of That Noble Dream, published in 1988, and The Holocaust in American Life, published in 1999, reveals both a consistent analytical sensibility and a significant evolution in what historian Peter Novick was willing to say about Jewish communal politics and the uses of historical memory. Together the two books form the most honest sustained critique of Jewish intellectual and organizational behavior produced by a Jewish scholar in the twentieth century, and the progression from one to the other is analytically illuminating.
Start with what the two books share, because the continuities are as important as the differences.
Both books are organized around the same core analytical insight, which is that the relationship between intellectuals and the institutions they participate in is shaped by specific coalition interests and specific historical anxieties that produce systematic distortions in how those intellectuals approach their subjects. In That Noble Dream the distortion operates on historical scholarship, specifically on the American historical profession’s engagement with the concept of objectivity and with the political and intellectual conflicts organized around that concept. In The Holocaust in American Life the distortion operates on collective memory, specifically on how American Jews and American society more broadly have constructed and used the memory of the Holocaust for purposes that are not primarily historical or moral but rather organizational, political, and psychological.
The analytical method is the same in both books. Novick proceeds by taking claims at face value, examining the evidence that supports or contradicts them, tracing the specific historical circumstances that produced them, and demonstrating the gap between the official justification for a position and the interests it serves. In That Noble Dream this method is applied to claims about historical objectivity. In The Holocaust in American Life it is applied to claims about the moral lessons of the Holocaust and the communal necessity of Holocaust consciousness.
The tone is also recognizably continuous. Novick in both books is simultaneously sympathetic to the communities he is analyzing and honest about what that analysis reveals. He does not write as an outsider condemning Jewish communal behavior from a position of superior detachment. He writes as someone who understands from inside why the behavior makes sense given the specific historical circumstances and specific institutional interests that produced it, while refusing to pretend that those circumstances and interests are invisible or that the behavior is simply the result of moral seriousness and historical obligation.
Now the differences, which are substantial.
The most important difference is the directness and the specificity of the critique. In That Noble Dream the Jewish dimension of the historical profession is one thread among many, and Novick’s treatment of it, while honest and precise, is embedded in a much larger argument about the sociology of knowledge in the American historical profession as a whole. The book’s central argument is about the concept of objectivity and its functions in the discipline, and the Jewish contribution to and complication of that argument is one dimension of a comprehensive intellectual history. Novick documents that Jews disproportionately championed the consensus interpretation, that they brought specific anxieties about Populism rooted in shtetl memory, that they adopted universalist frameworks as assimilation strategies, and that letters of recommendation for Jewish scholars included explicit references to the candidate not having offensive traits associated with his race. All of this is documented with precision and analyzed with honesty. But it is woven into a larger fabric that includes the WASP establishment, the Southern historians, the progressives, the new social historians, and the various other constituencies that make up the American historical profession.
In The Holocaust in American Life the Jewish dimension is the central subject rather than one thread among many. The book is explicitly and entirely about how American Jews and American Jewish organizations have constructed, promoted, and used Holocaust memory, and what that construction and use have done both to Jewish communal life and to American public culture more broadly. The analysis is therefore far more concentrated and far more specific in its identification of the organizational and political interests that have shaped Holocaust consciousness than anything in That Noble Dream.
The specific claims Novick makes in The Holocaust in American Life that go beyond anything in That Noble Dream are worth identifying because they represent a significant escalation in his willingness to name uncomfortable truths about Jewish communal politics.
The most important is his argument about the instrumental character of Holocaust consciousness in American Jewish organizational life. Novick documents that the promotion of Holocaust consciousness by major American Jewish organizations from the late 1960s onward was not primarily a response to the historical importance of the Holocaust or to the moral obligation to remember it. It was a response to specific organizational problems, specifically the declining commitment of younger American Jews to Jewish identity and to Jewish communal institutions, the increasing challenge to Israel’s international legitimacy after 1967, and the perceived need to mobilize American political support for Israel through the most powerful emotional and moral arguments available. The Holocaust provided all three organizations with their most effective tool for each of these purposes. It could be used to guilt younger Jews into communal commitment by implying that Holocaust ignorance was a form of betrayal of the victims. It could be used to neutralize criticism of Israel by making such criticism appear as a species of antisemitism that had led to the Holocaust. And it could be used to generate the political solidarity and the financial contributions that Jewish communal organizations depended on for their operation.
This argument is considerably more direct than anything in That Noble Dream about the relationship between Jewish organizational interests and the specific intellectual and cultural positions that Jewish institutions promote. In That Noble Dream Novick documents that Jewish historians adopted specific interpretive positions that served specific coalition interests. In The Holocaust in American Life he documents that Jewish organizations deliberately promoted a specific cultural and political framework not because it was historically accurate or morally necessary but because it served specific organizational and political purposes. The first observation is about the sociology of knowledge operating through the normal processes of professional formation and institutional incentive. The second observation is about calculated political strategy operating through deliberate organizational decision-making. The second is a considerably more direct and more damaging claim.
The second major difference is Novick’s explicit argument in The Holocaust in American Life about the distorting effects of Holocaust consciousness on both Jewish communal life and on American political culture. In That Noble Dream the distorting effects of Jewish coalition interests on historical scholarship are documented but not evaluated in terms of their broader social consequences. Novick shows that Jewish historians read Populism through the lens of shtetl memory and that this produced specific interpretive distortions, but he does not argue that this was a major disaster for American historical culture. The distortion is real and it is documented, but its consequences are primarily confined to the disciplinary debate about historical objectivity.
In The Holocaust in American Life Novick argues that Holocaust consciousness has had seriously damaging effects. He argues that it has promoted an exaggerated and empirically inaccurate sense of antisemitic threat in American Jewish communities, documenting that surveys showed antisemitic attitudes declining throughout the period when perceptions of antisemitic threat among American Jews were rising dramatically. He argues that it has contributed to a fortress mentality among American Jews that has undermined the universalist commitments that previously characterized Jewish political culture, documenting the shift from organizations that devoted substantial resources to civil rights and broader liberal causes to organizations that explicitly defined their mission as serving specifically Jewish interests and refused to invest organizational resources in anything that did not benefit Jews. He argues that it has been used to immunize Israel from legitimate criticism by framing all criticism of Israeli policies as a species of the antisemitism that produces Holocausts, documenting specific instances where this rhetorical strategy was deployed explicitly. And he argues that the institutional promotion of Holocaust consciousness as America’s primary moral framework for understanding genocide has undermined rather than supported serious engagement with American historical responsibility for other forms of mass violence.
This last argument is the most radical and the most important difference between the two books. Novick argues in The Holocaust in American Life that the Holocaust’s prominence in American moral discourse functions not to raise the level of moral seriousness about atrocity and injustice but to lower it, by providing a cheap and cost-free form of moral virtue, the condemnation of safely distant and safely dead perpetrators, that substitutes for the more demanding engagement with American historical responsibility for slavery, for the treatment of Native Americans, and for the ongoing effects of those histories in the present. He writes that contemplating the Holocaust is virtually cost-free and that a serious encounter with American racial history might imply costly demands while the Holocaust requires only, in his memorable phrase, a few cheap tears. This is a much stronger critique of the social function of Holocaust consciousness than anything in That Noble Dream, and it implicates not just the Jewish community but the broader American culture that has adopted the Holocaust as its preferred moral reference point.
The third major difference is what Novick says about the relationship between Holocaust consciousness and Jewish political behavior in the American domestic context. In That Noble Dream he documents that Jewish historians supported affirmative action as a universalist liberal principle and then withdrew support when affirmative action began to threaten Jewish institutional interests in education and employment. This is documented as an illustration of the general argument about how coalition interests shape intellectual positions, but it is one illustration among many and it is not developed into a broader argument about the direction of Jewish communal politics.
In The Holocaust in American Life Novick develops this observation into a comprehensive account of what he calls the inward turn of American Jewish organizational life from the late 1960s onward. He documents that the major American Jewish organizations shifted their priorities from universalist liberal causes, civil rights, the welfare state, opposition to racism, toward explicitly particularist Jewish causes, support for Israel, opposition to affirmative action, promotion of Holocaust consciousness, and the defense of specifically Jewish institutional interests. He documents the specific mechanisms by which Holocaust consciousness contributed to this inward turn, including the promotion of a fortress mentality rooted in the perception of omnipresent antisemitic threat, the explicit redefinition of Jewish identity around Holocaust memory rather than around the universalist liberal values that had previously characterized Jewish public culture, and the use of Holocaust rhetoric to delegitimize critics of Jewish organizational behavior by implying that such criticism was a form of the antisemitism that had enabled the Holocaust.
This argument is significantly more politically charged than anything in That Noble Dream. Novick is arguing not simply that Jewish intellectuals adopted specific interpretive positions that served coalition interests, which is the argument of That Noble Dream. He is arguing that the organized American Jewish community deliberately constructed and promoted a specific cultural and political framework, Holocaust consciousness, that served the specific interests of that community at the expense of the broader universalist liberal values that Jewish communal organizations had previously claimed to embody. The argument implies that the promotion of Holocaust consciousness was a form of coalition maintenance, the deployment of a convenient belief system in the service of specific institutional and political interests that are presented as moral obligations but that are organized around the needs of a specific coalition.
The fourth major difference is Novick’s argument about the relationship between Holocaust consciousness and the decline of serious historical understanding. In That Noble Dream the argument is that the concept of objectivity in American historical scholarship has been shaped by specific coalition interests and specific institutional pressures rather than by any neutral philosophical principle. This is an argument about the sociology of knowledge that applies to all historical scholarship, with the Jewish contribution being one important dimension of a broader picture.
In The Holocaust in American Life Novick argues that the specific form of Holocaust consciousness that has been promoted in American culture has actively undermined rather than promoted serious historical understanding of the Holocaust itself. He documents that the insistence on the uniqueness and incomprehensibility of the Holocaust has functioned to remove it from the domain of ordinary historical analysis and to place it in a quasi-religious framework that makes serious historical questions about causation, agency, and comparison seem like impious denials of its sacred character. He argues that this sacralization has made the Holocaust less useful rather than more useful as a resource for moral and historical understanding, because it converts a complex historical event into a morality tale organized around the confrontation of pure evil and pure virtue, which is what historical understanding must resist.
This argument implicates the Turner framework. The Holocaust’s sacralization in American Jewish culture and more broadly in American public culture exemplifies the operation of convenient beliefs as coalition maintenance devices. The claim that the Holocaust is incomprehensible and unique, beyond ordinary historical explanation, and that to apply ordinary historical analysis to it is itself a form of desecration, protects specific political and organizational interests by placing those interests beyond the reach of ordinary critical scrutiny. If the Holocaust is sacred and incomprehensible, then using Holocaust memory to mobilize support for Israel cannot be questioned as a political strategy because it is a moral obligation. If the Holocaust is sacred and unique, then using Holocaust rhetoric to silence criticism of Jewish communal behavior cannot be questioned as a rhetorical tactic because it is a legitimate defense against the antisemitism that the Holocaust represents. The convenient beliefs in the Holocaust’s incomprehensibility and its transcendence of ordinary historical analysis serves the specific organizational interests of the coalition that promotes it, in exactly the way Turner’s framework predicts convenient beliefs will serve coalition interests.
The fifth major difference between the two books is the directness with which Novick addresses the relationship between Holocaust consciousness and specifically Zionist politics. In That Noble Dream the relationship between Jewish political commitments and Jewish intellectual positions is documented as a general phenomenon, with Zionism appearing as one of several political commitments that shape the positions of Jewish historians. In The Holocaust in American Life Novick makes the specific argument that the promotion of Holocaust consciousness was heavily influenced by the needs of American Jewish organizations to mobilize support for Israel after the 1967 and 1973 wars, and that the specific form Holocaust consciousness took, with its emphasis on Jewish victimhood, the omnipresence of antisemitic threat, and the moral obligation of unconditional support for Israel, was shaped by those political requirements rather than by any independent historical or moral logic.
He documents this with specific evidence, including Leonard Fein’s editorial articulating the strategic problem that American Jewish leaders faced after the Yom Kippur War, which was how to persuade a post-Vietnam American public to continue supporting a small foreign state at considerable economic and political cost, and how Holocaust consciousness was identified as the most powerful available argument for that purpose. He documents the explicit argument made by ADL officials that Israel’s declining international standing was the result of fading Holocaust memory, and that promoting Holocaust consciousness was therefore both a moral obligation and a practical political necessity for the defense of Israel. He documents the use of Holocaust rhetoric to characterize critics of Israeli policies as equivalents of the bystanders who did nothing to prevent the Holocaust, and to frame any reduction in American support for Israel as a repetition of the abandonment of the Jews that had made the Holocaust possible.
This is more specific than anything in That Noble Dream. Novick is arguing not merely that Jewish political commitments shaped historical scholarship in general ways, but that a specific political agenda, the defense of Israeli interests in the context of post-1967 Middle East politics, shaped the specific form that Holocaust consciousness took in American culture. The argument is uncomfortable for the same reasons that Novick’s argument in That Noble Dream was uncomfortable, because it refuses the official justification for a cultural and political phenomenon, in this case the promotion of Holocaust consciousness as a moral obligation rooted in historical seriousness, and replaces it with a sociological analysis that shows the specific interests the phenomenon serves.
What the comparison between the two books reveals about Novick’s intellectual trajectory is significant. In That Noble Dream he is primarily a historian of the American historical profession doing a sociology of knowledge analysis of how that profession has constructed and defended the concept of objectivity. The Jewish dimension of that analysis is important and honest but it is embedded in a broader disciplinary history. In The Holocaust in American Life he is a Jewish intellectual doing a direct analysis of how his own community has constructed and used a specific historical memory for purposes that he regards as often intellectually dishonest and sometimes morally problematic. The shift from the first book to the second represents a willingness to say directly, as a Jewish scholar writing primarily for a Jewish and American audience, things about Jewish communal politics and the uses of Holocaust memory that most Jewish public intellectuals have been unwilling to say.
The response to the two books illustrates the coalition enforcement mechanisms that Turner’s framework and Pinsof’s Alliance Theory both predict. That Noble Dream was a scholarly controversy within the historical profession and was received, even by those who disagreed with specific arguments, as serious scholarly work that deserved serious engagement. The Holocaust in American Life was received by much of the organized Jewish community as a betrayal, as providing ammunition for antisemites, and as violating the communal obligation to protect the Holocaust from critical analysis. This reception is itself one of the phenomena that Novick documents in the book. The designation of honest critical analysis as a threat to communal security and a potential contribution to antisemitism is the coalition enforcement mechanism he describes operating to protect Holocaust consciousness from the scrutiny that any serious historical analysis requires. The reception of the book was, in other words, an illustration of its own argument.
The two books together represent the most sustained and most honest engagement by a Jewish scholar with the relationship between Jewish intellectual and organizational behavior and the specific interests that behavior serves. They are complementary in that the first documents the pattern in the domain of academic historical scholarship and the second documents it in the domain of collective memory and communal politics. And they are progressive in that the second says things that the first implied but did not state in their full political specificity. The overall picture they paint is one that my analysis throughout this conversation has been developing through the Turner, Pinsof, and Klingenstein frameworks, a picture of a community whose intellectual and organizational behavior is shaped by specific coalition interests and specific historical anxieties that produce systematic patterns that are simultaneously understandable given the historical circumstances that produced them and worth examining because the official justifications for those patterns are inadequate to account for what is going on.
The custodianship question asks who has the right and the capacity to transmit a tradition, what is gained and what is lost when custodians change, and what happens when the custodians of a tradition have specific structural reasons to handle it in ways that serve their own interests rather than the tradition’s integrity. In the literary and historical cases the tradition being transmitted was primarily a cultural and intellectual inheritance, the English literary canon, the American historical profession’s standards of scholarly objectivity, the national literary traditions of various European countries. In The Holocaust in American Life the tradition being transmitted is something different in kind and in stakes. It is the memory of a genocide, and the custodianship question therefore takes a form that is simultaneously more politically charged and more philosophically fundamental than anything the previous cases had required attending to.
The first and most fundamental contribution The Holocaust in American Life makes to the custodianship question is its demonstration that the custodians of the Holocaust’s memory are not the victims of the Holocaust.
This seems obvious when stated but its implications are profound and are almost never followed through honestly in the public discourse about Holocaust memory. The primary custodians of Holocaust memory in America, the organizations, institutions, and public figures who have most actively promoted Holocaust consciousness and most powerfully shaped how the Holocaust is understood and used in American culture, are not survivors. They are American Jews of the postwar generation, many of them several generations removed from the European experience, who have inherited the memory of an event they did not experience and who have used that inherited memory for purposes that Novick documents in detail.
This is the custodianship question. The tradition being transmitted is not a literary canon or a set of scholarly standards. It is the memory of the murder of six million people. The custodians are people who did not experience that murder and whose relationship to it is mediated through communal institutions, organizational interests, and political calculations that have shaped how the memory is constructed and transmitted. The gap between the experience and the memory, between the historical event and the cultural and political framework constructed around it, is the central subject of Novick’s book and it maps onto the custodianship question.
Novick’s documentation of the early postwar period is essential here. He shows that in the years immediately following the Holocaust, Holocaust consciousness was minimal not only among American gentiles but among American Jews themselves. Survivors were discouraged from speaking about their experiences. The organized Jewish community was reluctant to engage publicly with the Holocaust for reasons that Novick documents carefully, including anxiety about reinforcing the image of Jews as passive victims, concern about the cold war context in which Holocaust commemoration could be weaponized by Communists, and the pragmatic calculation that maximizing sympathy for Israel required presenting Jews as active agents rather than historical victims. The Holocaust as a distinct cultural entity, a capital-letter phenomenon with its own institutional infrastructure, its own commemorative calendar, its own educational programs and museums and films, did not exist in the early postwar period. It was constructed over several decades by specific organizations pursuing specific objectives.
This construction is a custodianship operation. Someone had to decide what the Holocaust meant, what lessons it taught, which dimensions of it deserved emphasis and which deserved minimization, which forms of engagement with it were legitimate and which were impermissible. These decisions were made not by the victims, who were dead, and not primarily by the survivors, who were present but institutionally marginalized, but by American Jewish organizational leaders and public intellectuals whose relationship to the Holocaust was mediated by their specific institutional positions and their specific political commitments.
The second contribution The Holocaust in American Life makes to the custodianship question is its documentation of the specific ways in which the custodians’ interests shaped the tradition they were transmitting.
Novick identifies several dimensions of this shaping that develop our custodianship discussion.
The insistence on uniqueness is the most philosophically important. The claim that the Holocaust was not merely historically significant but uniquely significant, incomparable to any other genocide or mass atrocity, was not an innocent historical judgment. Novick documents that it served specific organizational and political functions. By insisting on the Holocaust’s uniqueness, its custodians protected it from the comparative analysis that might have revealed its similarities to other atrocities, including some in which American Jews or the American government bore some responsibility. The uniqueness claim also protected the specific political uses of Holocaust memory from challenges based on analogy. If the Holocaust was truly unlike anything else in human history, then comparisons of Israeli policies to Holocaust perpetration were automatically illegitimate, regardless of their factual basis. And if the Holocaust was uniquely evil, then the moral authority derived from being its victims or their descendants was correspondingly unique and could not be challenged by reference to other victims’ experiences.
Novick documents that this claim was contested even within the scholarly community studying the Holocaust. Serious Holocaust historians debated whether and in what senses the Holocaust was unique, with many concluding that while it had distinctive features it was not beyond comparison and that the comparison of different cases of mass atrocity was essential for understanding them all. But this scholarly debate had minimal impact on the public cultural framework around Holocaust memory because the custodians of that framework had specific interests in maintaining the uniqueness claim and the institutional power to enforce it against challenges.
This is the custodianship problem. The tradition being transmitted, the public understanding of the Holocaust’s historical and moral significance, was being shaped not by the best available historical scholarship but by the interests of the organizations that controlled the institutions of transmission. The convenient belief in the Holocaust’s uniqueness served the coalition’s interests and was therefore maintained and promoted regardless of its relationship to the scholarly consensus.
The emphasis on Jewish victimhood and the downplaying of other victims is a second dimension of the shaping that Novick documents. The Holocaust killed not only Jews but also Roma, disabled people, homosexuals, political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, and others. The specific framework of Holocaust consciousness that was constructed and promoted by American Jewish organizations focused overwhelmingly on Jewish victims and treated the other victims as peripheral. Novick documents that this was not an innocent historical emphasis. It served the specific function of making the Holocaust’s moral authority available primarily to Jews and to the political causes that Jewish organizations were promoting, particularly Israel. If the Holocaust was primarily about Jewish suffering, then its lessons applied to Jewish vulnerability and the Jewish need for a secure homeland, which is the argument that was being made to mobilize American support for Israel.
A different set of custodians, with different interests, might have constructed a Holocaust memory that emphasized the common humanity of all the victims, that drew lessons about the dangers of any form of dehumanization directed at any group, and that used the Holocaust’s authority to support a broader universalist agenda. This is the memory that many survivor communities outside the Jewish community wanted to see transmitted. It is not the memory that was constructed and promoted by American Jewish organizations, because that memory would have diluted the specific political and organizational functions that Holocaust consciousness was being asked to serve.
The third contribution The Holocaust in American Life makes to the custodianship question is its analysis of what was lost in the construction of Holocaust consciousness and who bore the cost of those losses.
Novick argues that the sacralization of the Holocaust, its placement in a quasi-religious framework beyond ordinary historical analysis, has imposed real costs on the honest understanding of both the Holocaust itself and of other atrocities and historical injustices. The insistence that the Holocaust is incomprehensible, beyond ordinary historical explanation, has made it less available as a resource for moral and historical learning because it has removed it from the domain where learning happens. You cannot learn from something you are told is beyond understanding. You can only perform the appropriate emotional responses and accept the authorized political conclusions.
This is the distancing mechanism in reverse. In the case of Holocaust memory, the custodians are not outsiders analyzing a tradition they cannot fully inhabit. They are insiders managing a memory that they have too much interest in controlling to analyze honestly. The result is not the outsider’s critical distance but the insider’s protective opacity. The Holocaust cannot be analyzed comparatively, cannot be placed in ordinary historical context, cannot be examined for the political uses being made of it, because any such analysis is immediately designated as a threat to the memory’s sanctity and to the political functions it serves.
The cost of this protective opacity falls not only on the quality of Holocaust memory but on the capacity of American public culture to engage seriously with its own history of atrocity and injustice. Novick’s most important claim in this direction is his argument that Holocaust consciousness has functioned to provide a cheap moral credential that substitutes for engagement with American historical responsibility. Americans who solemnly commemorate the Holocaust, who visit the Holocaust museum in Washington and weep over the suffering of European Jews, can experience the moral satisfaction of bearing witness to atrocity without any of the political and economic costs that reckoning with American atrocity would require. Reckoning seriously with the history of slavery and its ongoing consequences would require costly redistribution. Reckoning seriously with the genocide of Native Americans would require costly legal and political restitution. Reckoning with the Holocaust requires only that cheap few tears that Novick mentions, because the perpetrators are dead, the era is past, and the reckoning implies no demands on the present.
The custodianship dimension of this argument is the most politically charged of all. The construction of Holocaust consciousness by American Jewish organizations has served the specific interests of those organizations and of the Israeli state they were mobilizing support for. But it has also served the specific interests of a broader American political culture that wanted a morally serious framework for thinking about atrocity without the politically and economically costly engagement with its own history that moral seriousness would require. The custodians of Holocaust memory and the broader American cultural and political establishment were in this respect allies rather than adversaries, each providing the other with something it wanted. The Jewish organizations got a powerful tool for mobilizing political support for Israel and for Jewish communal solidarity. The American establishment got a morally serious identity as the opponent of the most extreme form of evil in modern history without any corresponding obligation to examine its own forms of systematic injustice.
This mutual benefit is the Alliance Theory dimension of the custodianship question as The Holocaust in American Life reveals it. The promotion of Holocaust consciousness was not simply a matter of Jewish organizations pursuing their specific interests. It was a coalition operation in which the Jewish organizations and the broader American cultural and political establishment converged on a framework that served both their interests simultaneously. The convergence was not planned or coordinated. It was the product of the same alliance formation logic that Pinsof documents, similarity, transitivity, and interdependence operating to produce a stable and mutually beneficial coalition around a specific cultural framework.
The fourth contribution The Holocaust in American Life makes to the custodianship question is its documentation of what happens when the custodians of a memory have a specific interest in maintaining the emotional intensity of that memory regardless of its relationship to historical reality.
Novick documents the specific organizational dynamics that produced increasingly extreme Holocaust consciousness through the 1970s and 1980s. The organizations that most actively promoted Holocaust consciousness were financially dependent on contributions from American Jews, and those contributions were proportional to the level of anxiety and solidarity that Jewish organizational leaders could generate. The Holocaust was the most powerful available tool for generating that anxiety and solidarity. Organizations that used Holocaust consciousness most aggressively in their fundraising, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League most prominently, were the most financially successful. Organizations that maintained a more measured and historically accurate relationship to Holocaust memory were less financially successful and declined in influence.
This is the market forces dimension of the custodianship question. The tradition was being transmitted not by those most qualified to transmit it accurately but by those whose organizational survival depended on transmitting it in the most emotionally compelling and politically useful form. The result was a systematic escalation of Holocaust consciousness beyond what historical reality warranted and beyond what the survivors themselves, many of whom were uncomfortable with the public culture of Holocaust commemoration that developed around them, would have chosen.
Novick documents this specifically with respect to the perception of antisemitism. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as survey research consistently showed antisemitic attitudes among Americans declining, the Jewish organizations that depended on anxiety about antisemitism for their financial survival were consistently reporting that antisemitism was rising. The ADL in particular, Novick documents, was assiduous in giving wide circulation to antisemitic remarks by obscure figures, vastly amplifying their audiences and their apparent significance in order to generate the anxiety that sustained organizational fundraising. This was not a conspiracy. It was the predictable output of organizations whose financial survival depended on maintaining a specific level of perceived threat, operating in an environment where the threat was declining. The convenient belief in rising antisemitism served the coalition’s organizational interests and was therefore promoted and maintained regardless of its relationship to the empirical evidence.
The fifth and most profound contribution The Holocaust in American Life makes to the custodianship question concerns the relationship between the survivors and the custodians, and what happened to the survivors’ own testimony in the process of constructing the public culture of Holocaust memory.
Novick documents that the survivors’ relationship to the public culture of Holocaust consciousness was complicated and often uncomfortable in ways that the public culture itself suppressed. Many survivors wanted to move forward rather than to live permanently in the shadow of their experience. Many found the public culture of Holocaust commemoration an inappropriate and sometimes exploitative use of their suffering. Many disagreed with the specific political conclusions that Jewish organizations were drawing from the Holocaust, including the unconditional support for Israeli policies that was presented as the obvious lesson of the Holocaust’s history. And many were uncomfortable with the sacralization of the Holocaust’s memory, which converted a historical event into something beyond ordinary human understanding and thereby made it less available for the kind of engagement that historical understanding requires.
The suppression of this discomfort is a custodianship operation. The public culture of Holocaust memory required survivors to perform a specific role, the traumatized witness bearing testimony to the unspeakable, and survivors who stepped outside that role, who questioned the political uses being made of their experience, who suggested that the Holocaust might be understood through ordinary historical analysis rather than sacred incomprehensibility, were treated as threats to the memory rather than as its most authoritative custodians. Novick documents the reception of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem as the paradigmatic case. Arendt was a survivor who had lost family in the Holocaust and who brought to the Eichmann trial the full weight of her philosophical formation and her personal historical experience. Her insistence on analyzing the trial as a historical and philosophical event rather than as a sacred ceremony provoked the coalition enforcement response. She was designated as a threat to the community rather than honored as one of its most serious intellectual contributors, because her analysis challenged the specific framework of Holocaust consciousness that the organizational custodians had constructed and depended on.
The irony that Novick documents throughout the book is therefore this. The people with the most legitimate claim to be the custodians of Holocaust memory, the survivors who experienced the events being commemorated, were progressively marginalized in the construction of Holocaust consciousness by organizational custodians whose relationship to the Holocaust was mediated by institutional interests and political calculations rather than by personal experience. The tradition was transmitted not by those who had lived it but by those who had specific reasons to shape it in ways that served their organizational and political needs. And the specific form in which it was transmitted, the sacred incomprehensible monumental Holocaust that teaches the specific political lessons that American Jewish organizations needed it to teach, was significantly different from the complex, historically specific, morally ambiguous event that the survivors had experienced and that serious historical scholarship was documenting.
This is the custodianship question. The tradition was real. The suffering it recorded was real. The obligation to remember was real. But the custodians who controlled the institutions of memory had specific interests in transmitting a version of the tradition that served those interests, and the result was a transmitted version that was both politically powerful and historically distorted in ways that Novick documents with characteristic precision and characteristic discomfort.
What The Holocaust in American Life adds to the custodianship question overall is therefore a demonstration that the question operates not only in the domain of literary and historical scholarship but in the domain of collective memory itself, and that in the domain of collective memory the stakes are higher, the distortions are more consequential, and the coalition enforcement tools are more powerful because they are backed not merely by professional sanctions but by the moral authority of genocide itself. The custodians of Holocaust memory were able to designate challenges to their framework as equivalent to Holocaust denial or as providing ammunition for antisemites because the moral authority of the Holocaust’s memory gave their coalition enforcement a power that the literary or historical custodians my analysis examined in earlier cases could not have accessed. This is the specific contribution The Holocaust in American Life makes to the custodianship argument, and it is a contribution that illuminates the broader argument by showing what happens when the stakes of custodianship are raised from the domain of cultural inheritance to the domain of traumatic historical memory, and when the coalition enforcement powers available to the custodians include not merely professional marginalization but the moral authority of the most documented mass genocide.
If Peter Novick was the diagnostician, philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the doctor trying to prevent the disease. He asked what political order would prevent a coalition from gaining power over the philosophical tradition he inhabited.
Strauss, who was Jewish, secular and an atheist, performed scholarly preoccupation with the question of the philosopher’s relationship to the city, and with the question of whether a liberal political order could be made sufficiently stable and sufficiently tolerant to allow people like himself to live and think freely without either being destroyed by antisemitic violence or being forced to subordinate their intellectual lives to the requirements of a specifically Jewish political project. His critique of liberal relativism, his recovery of natural right, his insistence on the importance of political philosophy as a serious discipline, all of these can be read in the light of the specific historical experience of a German Jew who watched the Weimar Republic’s liberal tolerance collapse into Nazism and who spent the rest of his life trying to understand how a liberal political order could be made more robust against that kind of collapse.
His relationship to Zionism is relevant. Strauss was not a Zionist in any conventional sense. He didn’t live in Israel. He was skeptical of the Zionist solution to the Jewish question not primarily because he was attached to diaspora life as such but because he understood Zionism as a form of the same modern political project, the reduction of the Jewish question to a political and territorial problem, that he regarded as philosophically inadequate to the depths of the problem it was trying to solve. His early essay on Zionism and his correspondence with various Zionist thinkers show that he understood the Jewish question as fundamentally a theological and philosophical question, the question of what it means to be a Jew in a world that has abandoned the biblical framework within which Jewish existence made sense, and that he regarded the Zionist political solution as a way of evading that question rather than answering it.
Strauss’s deepest concern was not explicitly about making the world safe for secular Jews. It was about what he called the crisis of the West, the crisis produced by the abandonment of the classical philosophical tradition and the biblical tradition that had together provided Western civilization with its understanding of what human beings are and what they are for. His argument was that modern liberalism, having abandoned both classical natural right and biblical revelation as the foundations of political order, had replaced them with a relativism that could not defend itself against the most extreme challenges, including Nazism, because it had no philosophical resources for saying that some ways of life are better than others.
Strauss’s argument that the great philosophers of the past wrote in ways that concealed their most dangerous conclusions from the many while making them available to the few, is a form of the custodianship problem. Strauss argued that philosophy is permanently in tension with political society because philosophical questions, pursued to their conclusions, threaten the conventional beliefs and the religious foundations on which political communities depend for their stability. The philosopher therefore writes esoterically, saying one thing on the surface for the political community’s consumption and another thing between the lines for the philosophical reader capable of understanding it.
This argument is both a description of a historical practice that Strauss claimed to have recovered and a prescription for how the philosopher should behave in any political community. Applied to Strauss’s own position, it suggests that the political philosophy he presented publicly, with its emphasis on natural right and the importance of political philosophy as a discipline, was the exoteric surface of a more radical philosophical position that he communicated more cautiously.
Strauss’s defense of liberal political order against relativism and historicism was likely in service of something more specific and more personal, the maintenance of the conditions under which philosophical life could be pursued by people like himself.
Strauss was trying to make the world safe for the philosopher, understood as someone whose intellectual commitments are in permanent tension with the conventional beliefs and the political imperatives of any community. The Jewish secular intellectual in the diaspora is one instance of this figure, shaped by specific historical circumstances, but the figure itself is not specifically Jewish. Socrates is the paradigm case, and Socrates was not Jewish and was not trying to preserve the conditions for diaspora Jewish intellectual life.
In his 2013 book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, Paul Gottfried establishes that Strauss’s intellectual project cannot be understood apart from his being born a Jew, in Germany, at the end of the nineteenth century. These three facts, Gottfried argues, are more explanatory than any of the standard intellectual genealogies of Strauss’s thinking. The flight from Weimar antisemitism, the experience of a liberal order that could not protect its Jewish members, the attachment to Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism in youth, the sustained lifelong identification with what Gottfried calls am yisrael, the Jewish people, these biographical facts shaped the political philosophy in ways that the Straussian school and its defenders have minimized. Gottfried quotes Strauss’s student George Anastaplo noting the special favor Strauss showed to students who expressed his ahavat yisrael, love of Israel, and the scorn he sometimes reserved for those imprudent enough to show the opposite sentiment. This is not the behavior of a philosopher above partisan attachment. It is the behavior of someone for whom ethnic loyalty was a permanent reference point around which the philosophical project was organized.
Gottfried shows that Strauss developed a specific solution to a specific problem. The problem was the vulnerability of diaspora Jews in European societies whose liberal tolerance could not be relied upon to hold. The solution was not Zionism, which Strauss regarded as philosophically insufficient and personally unappealing despite his ideological sympathy for it, but liberal democracy of a specifically Anglo-American character, fortified against the relativism and historicism that had made Weimar’s liberalism collapse. England, which Strauss experienced briefly at Cambridge in the 1930s, gave him the alternative model. Churchill became his cult figure. Anglo-American liberal democracy became the political framework within which diaspora Jewish intellectual life could be sustained and protected. The entire philosophical apparatus, the recovery of classical natural right, the assault on historicism and relativism, the distinction between esoteric and exoteric writing, all of this served the function of providing philosophical foundations for a political order that would be safe for people like Strauss.
Strauss wanted a militant liberal democracy engaged in a permanent struggle against its most dangerous enemies, which in Strauss’s historical experience were Germany and the German intellectual tradition. The assault on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Weber in Natural Right and History was not a philosophical argument about historicism and relativism in the abstract. It was a political argument about which intellectual traditions were dangerous to the specific political order that made secular Jewish intellectual life possible. The German intellectual tradition that had produced Nazism had to be culturally and intellectually defeated, not just militarily. The American and British democratic traditions had to be elevated to the status of philosophical exemplars, not merely as political preferences but as embodiments of truths that were universal and universally applicable. This elevation served the specific protective function that Strauss needed liberal democracy to serve.
Gottfried’s most important analytical contribution is his demonstration that the Straussians were not conservatives, and that their relationship to the American conservative movement was one of ideological capture rather than intellectual affinity. He shows that Strauss was throughout his life a Cold War liberal, that he voted for Adlai Stevenson, that he regarded Eisenhower as too far to the right, that his disciples described themselves as fighting liberal Democrats and Truman-Kennedy internationalists. The conservative movement that embraced Strauss and his legacy did so out of a desperate need for academic respectability and a perceived need to answer the charge of relativism, not because there was philosophical affinity between Straussian politics and traditional conservatism. What the Straussians gave the conservative movement was a vocabulary for defending liberal democracy against its critics, which was not what traditional conservatives wanted at all. Traditional conservatives, Gottfried shows, were interested in defending an existing Anglo-Protestant civilization with its specific cultural inheritance, its specific relationship to Christianity, its specific understanding of constitutional order rooted in historical development rather than in founding propositions. The Straussians defended a propositional universal nation defined by its founding creed and its mission to extend liberal democracy across the world. These are not the same project.
The Straussians captured the American conservative movement’s institutional apparatus, its flagship publications, its academic positions, its public intellectual platforms, and used that apparatus to transmit a different tradition than the one the conservative movement had been developing. They replaced a historically rooted, culturally specific, Christian-inflected conservatism with a propositional universalism organized around abstract democratic values and a Manichean distinction between liberal democracy and its enemies. The custodians of the conservative intellectual tradition changed, and what was transmitted changed with them.
The specific method of this capture is illuminating. The Straussians did not argue the old conservatives into submission. They occupied the institutional positions that controlled access to funding, publication, and academic credentials, and they simply declined to engage with their most cogent critics. Gottfried documents this pattern with unusual specificity. The correspondence between Barry Shain and Thomas Pangle is one of the most revealing documents in the book. Pangle responded to Shain’s historically grounded critique of the Straussian reading of the American founding not by engaging the argument but by warning Shain that his approach was dangerous, that his language recalled Carl Schmitt in 1934, that he was exposing himself to unspecified dangers by questioning the democratic legitimacy of the founding. Coalition enforcement operates in pure form. The challenge to the convenient belief is met not with argument but with moral designation of the challenger as threatening to the community. Shain was told that historical honesty about the Protestant character of the American founding was irresponsible in ways that revealed the specifically political rather than philosophical character of the Straussian project.
Paul Gottfried wrote:
[Strauss] and his disciples typically find the esoteric meaning of texts to entail beliefs they themselves consider rational and even beneficent. Instead of thinking that their subjects are people, like ourselves, belonging to specific ages and cultures, we are made to assume that they really embraced the values and beliefs of their later interpreters. If this cannot be determined at first glance, then we must look deeper, until we can arrive at the desired coincidence of views.
Needless to say, the “hidden” views never turn out to be Christian heresies or any belief that would not accord with the prescribed rationalist worldview. A frequently heard joke about this “foreshortening” hermeneutic is that a properly read text for a Straussian would reveal that its author is probably a Jewish intellectual who resides in New York or Chicago. Being a person of moderation, the author, like his interpreter, would have attended synagogue services twice a year, on the High Holy Days – and then probably not in an Orthodox synagogue.
The esoteric meanings Straussians discover in past texts are consistently the meanings that their own formation generates as natural and obvious. Plato’s esoteric teaching turns out to be religious skepticism and implicit support for liberal political order. Maimonides’ esoteric teaching turns out to be philosophical rationalism concealed beneath Orthodox Jewish veneer. Locke’s esoteric teaching turns out to be secular materialism compatible with liberal democracy. In every case the hidden truth that the Straussians claim to recover is a truth that looks remarkably like their own formation projected onto the past. This is the hermeneutical version of the custodianship problem. The tradition read by custodians whose formation shapes what they find in it, and what they find is consistently what serves the political and intellectual needs of their specific community.
The decoder ring claim rests on several moves that Gottfried shows are question-begging at every step.
The first move is establishing that past thinkers practiced esoteric writing as a matter of course, concealing their real views from the many while signaling them to the few through carefully placed inconsistencies, suspicious omissions, and hints buried in apparently conventional positions. Strauss argued this was necessary because philosophers living before liberal political orders had to protect themselves from persecution by religious and political authorities. The argument has some historical plausibility for specific cases in specific periods. It has considerably less plausibility as a universal claim about all major political thinkers across all periods and contexts, which is how Strauss and his disciples applied it.
The second move is the critical one and the most vulnerable. Having established that past thinkers hid their real views, Strauss then claimed the ability to recover those views through close reading. But as Gottfried and others he cites point out, the method is radically underdetermined. There is no principled way to establish that a given inconsistency or omission in a text represents deliberate esoteric signaling rather than ambivalence, intellectual development, the limitations of the author’s knowledge, or simply bad writing. Strauss and his followers consistently chose the esoteric interpretation when other explanations were equally or more plausible, and they chose it in ways that produced the same result regardless of which thinker was being read.
This is the decoder ring problem. A decoder ring produces the same decoded message regardless of who is operating it, because the code is in the text rather than in the decoder. Strauss’s method produced the same decoded message, namely philosophical skepticism about religion combined with implicit support for a rationalist political liberalism, regardless of which text was being decoded, because the message was in the decoder rather than in the text. Plato’s esoteric view turned out to be skepticism about the eternal forms he apparently believed in. Maimonides’ esoteric view turned out to be rationalist philosophy concealed beneath Orthodox Jewish practice he observed. Spinoza’s esoteric view turned out to involve more sympathy for Jewish particularity than his apparent preference for Christianity as a vehicle for liberal universalism suggested. In each case the hidden truth that the decoding revealed was a version of what Strauss himself believed, translated back into the historical period of the thinker being decoded.
Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) charges Strauss with leaping over the hermeneutic problem by claiming to achieve objective knowledge of what an ancient author was saying. Strauss asserted that authors understand themselves adequately, which means that the text contains a recoverable determinate meaning that a sufficiently skilled reader can access. But this claim abolishes the historical distance between reader and text that hermeneutic awareness requires. Strauss was not recovering what Plato or Maimonides thought. He was producing what a twentieth century German Jewish philosopher formed in a specific intellectual tradition thought when reading Plato or Maimonides through that formation, and then presenting this as the hidden truth of the original text.
The Polka and Havers critique that Gottfried develops adds the most damaging specific illustration. They show that Strauss’s reading of Spinoza as a crypto-secularist who expressed preference for a universalist Christianity over a particularist Judaism only because he needed protective coloration as a marginalized Dutch Jew is far less plausible than the alternative reading that Spinoza believed what he wrote. The simpler explanation, that Spinoza found the Christian universalist ethics of the Gospels preferable to the Mosaic legal code as a foundation for liberal political society, is both more historically parsimonious and more consistent with the available evidence. Strauss rejected this reading not because the evidence required rejecting it but because accepting it would have meant acknowledging that Spinoza had abandoned Jewish particularity rather than merely disguising it, which was uncomfortable for reasons that had more to do with Strauss’s own Jewish formation than with anything in the text.
The Aristotle case illustrates the same problem from a different angle. Strauss claimed that Plato did not believe in the eternal forms that dominate his dialogues, that the theological and metaphysical dimensions of Plato’s work were teaching tools rather than beliefs, that the real Plato was something like a classical rationalist skeptic who used mythological and theological language to make his philosophical project accessible to those incapable of pure philosophical inquiry. Gottfried points out that this reading requires one to believe that Plato’s own students, the founders of neo-Platonism, the entire subsequent tradition of Platonic thought extending over more than a millennium, all misread their teacher on the most central features of his philosophy, and that it required an Arab commentator in the medieval period and then a twentieth century German Jewish refugee to finally recover what Plato meant. The implausibility of this claim as history is remarkable. It is considerably less remarkable if one understands it not as history but as the projection of a specific modern rationalist formation onto ancient texts that were then used to authorize that formation as timelessly valid.
Skinner’s critique that Gottfried presents is the most methodologically precise. Skinner argues that you cannot understand what past thinkers meant without understanding the specific political and intellectual problems they were addressing in their own historical contexts, using the specific conceptual vocabulary available to them, responding to the specific challenges and opponents they faced. Strauss’s method consistently violated this requirement by treating past thinkers as philosophical contemporaries whose real concerns could be read off their texts without the difficult contextual work that historical understanding requires. The result was not recovery of what past thinkers thought but the construction of a philosophical tradition that served present purposes, a usable past assembled from misread texts.
The Butterfield Whig history parallel that Gottfried draws is particularly apt. Butterfield argued that Whig historians read the past as a progressive movement toward the present, finding in it forerunners of the values they already held and presenting those forerunners as the true representatives of historical development. Strauss did something structurally identical. He read the history of political philosophy as a movement whose true representatives were those who anticipated the specific form of rationalist liberal universalism that he himself believed in, and he used his decoder ring to ensure that the most important figures in that history turned out, when properly read, to be pointing in the direction he was already going. The claim to be recovering the ancients was in practice the claim to have found in the ancients a justification for a thoroughly modern and thoroughly specific political position.
The esoteric reading doctrine is itself a convenient belief in Turner’s precise sense. It serves the coalition’s interests by providing a method that always produces the results the coalition needs. Any text that seems to support religious belief or cultural particularism or historical rootedness can be decoded as really expressing the rationalist skepticism and liberal universalism that the Straussian project requires. Any critic who points out that the decoded message looks remarkably like the decoder’s own formation can be dismissed as insufficiently trained in the art of esoteric reading. The method is self-sealing in exactly the way Turner’s account of convenient beliefs predicts. It immunizes itself against empirical challenge by defining the challenge as evidence of the challenger’s inadequacy rather than as evidence of the method’s failure.
Alliance Theory adds a further dimension. The esoteric reading doctrine served the Straussian coalition’s specific interests by providing a framework within which Jewish rationalist skepticism could be presented as the hidden truth of the Western philosophical tradition rather than as one specific formation among others. It allowed Strauss and his followers to claim the authority of Plato, Maimonides, Spinoza, Locke, and the American founders for positions that were in reality the specific positions of a specific community with specific historical experiences and specific political needs. The decoder ring was not a tool for recovering hidden truths. It was a tool for appropriating the tradition’s authority for coalition purposes while appearing to engage in disinterested philosophical scholarship.
Gottfried is too careful a scholar to put it quite this bluntly, but the implication runs throughout his analysis. The Straussian hermeneutic was less a method of reading than a method of writing, specifically of writing the Straussian political and philosophical formation into the history of Western thought and then presenting that writing as recovery. This is not the worst thing an intellectual tradition can do. Most traditions engage in some version of selective appropriation of the past. But it is dishonest to present appropriation as recovery, and the dishonesty compounded itself as the method was applied with decreasing sophistication by successive generations of disciples for whom the political conclusions preceded the textual readings with increasing transparency.
Strauss’s project was not merely personal or narrowly ethnic. It was a philosophical project that served a specific communal interest through the development of ideas that had real philosophical content and real intellectual power. The assault on historicism and relativism is not simply special pleading for Jewish security in disguise. It is a philosophical argument that engages real problems in political philosophy and that connects to legitimate concerns about the foundations of liberal political order that matter to everyone living within that order. The custodianship question as Gottfried illuminates it is not that Strauss was dishonest or that his project was merely self-interested. It is that his specific formation shaped what he saw as the most important philosophical questions, what he regarded as the most dangerous intellectual traditions, and what he understood as the proper relationship between philosophical inquiry and political commitment. That shaping was not neutral and its consequences for the institutions his followers came to control were significant, because the tradition those institutions transmitted was shaped by a formation that was not continuous with the traditions those institutions had been built to preserve.
Strauss did not only damage American intellectual life. He also built. His insistence that past political thinkers deserved careful, sustained reading rather than quick historical summary, that Plato and Thucydides and Maimonides had important things to say, that the rush to contemporary relevance in political science was producing shallow thinking, represented an intellectual contribution. The sheer philological range of the early Strauss, the command of multiple ancient and modern languages, the ability to read across Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew philosophical traditions simultaneously, was impressive. His works on Spinoza, Maimonides, and Hobbes demonstrated scholarly gifts that were independent of the politically motivated hermeneutic that characterized his later American work and the work of his disciples.
The Walgreen Lectures, published as Natural Right and History, connected the technical philosophical debates about historicism and positivism to the political catastrophe that educated Americans had just lived through, and did so in ways that made the philosophical stakes of seemingly abstract methodological debates visible to a broader audience. Whatever the flaws in Strauss’s specific argument, the argument that the collapse of the belief in natural right had contributed to making Nazism intellectually possible was a serious claim that deserved serious engagement. Gottfried grants that Strauss’s critique of Weber’s fact-value distinction, however ultimately unpersuasive, identified tensions in the positivist social science that dominated American universities in the 1950s.
Within the conservative intellectual world, Strauss and his followers provided something that the movement lacked, which was academic respectability and a vocabulary for engaging the question of moral relativism at the philosophical level. Before the Straussians established themselves in elite universities and in movement conservative publications, American conservatism was largely a journalistic and polemical enterprise without serious academic representation. The Straussians changed this, and Gottfried acknowledges that this change had value for the intellectual quality of public debate about political philosophy.
Now the losses, which occupy more of Gottfried’s analytical attention.
The most fundamental loss Gottfried identifies is the displacement of a historically rooted, culturally specific, and intellectually serious conservatism by a propositional universalism that dressed itself in conservative rhetoric while abandoning conservative substance. Before the Straussian influence became dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, the American conservative intellectual tradition included serious engagement with the question of historical inheritance, with the Protestant and Anglo-Celtic cultural foundations of American constitutional order, with the specific character of American republican institutions as distinct from abstract liberal democracy, and with the limits of universal principles as guides to political practice. Figures like Russell Kirk, M.E. Bradford, Willmoore Kendall before his conversion to Straussianism, and the broader Old Right represented a alternative to both liberal progressivism and the emerging neoconservative synthesis. Gottfried shows that the Straussians marginalized this alternative, not by engaging and defeating its arguments but by excluding its representatives from the institutional platforms they controlled. The anti-Straussian right was simply not invited to debate. Its journals were ignored, its scholars were not reviewed, its arguments were not engaged. The conservative intellectual tradition was captured and redirected without the traditional conservatives who built it getting a fair hearing.
The specific intellectual content that was lost in this displacement matters for Gottfried’s analysis. The historically minded conservatism that the Straussians replaced had a richer and more honest account of the American founding than the Straussian version. Scholars like Barry Shain and M.E. Bradford demonstrated that the American founding was a culturally specific Protestant enterprise that could not be reduced to Lockean natural rights theory, that the early American republic was shaped by Calvinist theology, by British constitutional tradition, by the specific social conditions of the Anglo-American colonies, in ways that made the Straussian propositional account both historically inaccurate and politically misleading. The Straussians suppressed this more accurate account because it interfered with their project of presenting America as a universal creedal nation whose founding principles were applicable to all peoples everywhere. The cost was a systematic falsification of American history in the service of a political agenda.
The cult of democratic heroes that the Straussians promoted represents another loss that Gottfried documents. The specific heroes, Lincoln most prominently and Churchill as the paradigmatic democratic statesman, were elevated not on the basis of careful historical analysis but because they served the Straussian political narrative. Lincoln was valorized because Harry Jaffa’s reading of Lincoln made the Civil War a war for the universal principle of human equality, which then became the template for subsequent American wars for democracy. Churchill was valorized because he embodied the Anglo-American democratic resistance to specifically German political evil that was central to the Straussian understanding of twentieth century history. Gottfried shows that this cult of democratic heroes produced a distorted political culture in which the martial virtues, the willingness to sacrifice, the spirit of crusading democracy, were celebrated and the costs of democratic militarism were minimized. The result was an intellectual culture that consistently underestimated the dangers of American military adventurism and consistently overestimated the capacity of American military power to transform foreign societies in accordance with democratic principles.
The neoconservative foreign policy that Gottfried regards as the most damaging practical consequence of Straussian influence represents the fullest expression of this militaristic democratic universalism. By presenting every conflict between liberal democracy and its opponents as a reenactment of the 1938 Munich moment, by making the refusal to use American military power against undemocratic regimes equivalent to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, the Straussians and their neoconservative disciples created an intellectual framework that made the Iraq War possible and that left the American conservative movement intellectually defenseless against the enthusiasm for democratizing the Middle East through force. Gottfried is direct about this. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader framework of the war on terror were the practical political consequences of Straussian and neoconservative thinking applied to foreign policy. A conservative intellectual tradition, one that took seriously the historical and cultural preconditions for democratic government and that was skeptical of universalist projects for remaking foreign societies, would have been far more resistant to these adventures. The Straussian displacement of that tradition removed the intellectual resources that might have prevented or moderated them.
The subordination of the American conservative movement to Israeli foreign policy interests is another consequence Gottfried documents. He shows that the Straussian framework, which presented Israel as an outpost of liberal democracy in the Middle East and Israeli security as inseparable from the defense of liberal democratic values generally, made it effectively impossible for American conservatives who accepted the Straussian framework to criticize Israeli policies on their merits. The Claremont Institute’s unqualified support for the Israeli nationalist coalition, the Weekly Standard’s consistent advocacy for Israeli interests in American foreign policy debates, the systematic designation of critics of Israeli policy as antisemites or relativists or enemies of liberal democracy, all of these followed naturally from the Straussian framework. The American national interest in the Middle East was subordinated to an agenda shaped by the specific concerns of a diaspora Jewish community that had found in the Straussian framework a way of presenting those concerns as universal democratic values.
The corruption of the concept of conservatism itself is the broadest loss that Gottfried identifies. By successfully positioning Straussian liberal universalism as the authentic form of American conservatism, the Straussians made it possible for publications like National Review to celebrate Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind and Jaffa’s Lincoln studies as conservative classics, to support civil rights legislation and the Immigration Reform of 1965 as necessary steps for mobilizing liberal democracy against the Soviet threat, to endorse a muscular welfare state as compatible with conservative principles, and to frame military intervention in foreign countries for democratic purposes as a conservative foreign policy. None of these positions is conservative in the sense that the intellectual tradition the Straussians displaced would have recognized. All of them are expressions of the Cold War liberal internationalism that Strauss himself explicitly identified with. The result was a conservative movement that had been captured by people who were not conservatives, that was defending values that were not conservative, and that had lost the intellectual resources to articulate a conservative alternative to progressive liberalism. When the progressive left was defeated rhetorically, what replaced it was not conservatism but a more bellicose and more universalist version of the same liberal project with different cultural aesthetics.
The treatment of the right wing critics Gottfried regards as most important demonstrates this loss. Barry Shain’s careful scholarship on the Protestant character of the American founding, M.E. Bradford’s historically grounded conservatism, the intellectuals of the Southern tradition who understood the specific cultural preconditions for American self-government, these figures were simply excluded from the conservative intellectual conversation that the Straussians controlled. Their arguments were not refuted. They were ignored, or when they could not be ignored, they were designated as dangerous. Pangle’s letter to Shain, warning that his historical approach recalled Schmitt in 1934 and exposed him to unspecified dangers, is for Gottfried the paradigmatic illustration of this exclusion. The coalition enforcement mechanism operating in the Straussian intellectual world was not argument but moral designation, and the cost to American intellectual life was the suppression of a serious alternative to the progressive liberal consensus that the Straussians claimed to be opposing while reproducing in a different key.
Strauss and his followers may have improved American intellectual life by performing philosophical seriousness to the study of classical political thought and by making the question of moral foundations in political philosophy a live issue for a broader audience than academic philosophy normally reaches. They hurt American intellectual life by displacing a more historically honest and more conservative intellectual tradition, by producing a cult of democratic heroes that fed a dangerous militarism, by subordinating American foreign policy thinking to the specific concerns of a diaspora Jewish community, by excluding their most cogent critics from the institutional platforms they controlled, and by corrupting the concept of conservatism itself so thoroughly that by the time of the Iraq War the American right had no intellectual resources with which to resist a military adventure that a conservative political culture would have recognized as the kind of utopian universalist project that conservative thinking exists to oppose.
Strauss wanted all the benefits of religious society along with incompatible freedoms of inquiry but he was not prepared to pay the prices of these freedoms. He reminds me of people who ostensibly adopt Orthodox Judaism but refuse to practice it. Formation is not separable from practice. You cannot acquire the formation through intellectual assent to the propositions, through studying the texts, through understanding the arguments for why the halakha makes sense. The formation is produced through the accumulated practice of doing the thing, day after day, year after year, across generations. The Shabbat that a family has observed for four generations has a completely different character from the Shabbat that an intellectually convinced convert attempts to observe on his own, not because the convert is insincere but because the tacit formation that makes the practice feel natural and generative rather than effortful and artificial is not something that can be acquired quickly or through intellectual effort alone. My failure to live up to the thick demands may not just be a personal failing. It is Turner’s point about the tacit demonstrated in my own experience. The tradition requires custodians who inhabit it, and inhabiting it is a lifetime project that is considerably easier when the formation begins in childhood and is supported by a thick community of people who share it.
Strauss understood this intellectually. He wrote about it with considerable sophistication, particularly in his engagement with Rosenzweig and in his discussions of the relationship between philosophy and revelation. But as Gottfried documents, he did not live it. He observed ahavat yisrael, love of the Jewish people, as a cultural and ethnic commitment rather than as a formation rooted in practice. He wanted the authority that Jewish religious formation provides, the sense of participating in a tradition of enormous depth and continuity, without paying the price that formation requires. He wanted the benefits without the cost.
Do Strauss’s stories make evolutionary sense? For example, can the tribe afford to allow the kind of philosophical inquiry Strauss wanted to protect? This is not merely a sociological observation. It is an evolutionary claim with real force. Tribes that allowed unlimited philosophical questioning of their foundational commitments, their religious practices, their boundary maintenance mechanisms, their reproductive norms, their loyalty structures, did not survive in competition with tribes that maintained those commitments through the enforcement mechanisms that make formation possible. The Orthodox Jewish community is itself one of the most striking examples of evolutionary robustness through thick formation. It maintains extraordinarily high levels of internal coherence, reproductive success, educational investment, and communal solidarity by refusing to make the kind of philosophical accommodation that Strauss wanted liberal democracy to make possible.
The tension Strauss was navigating is therefore not just personal or philosophical. It is an evolutionary tension between two incompatible strategies. The tribal strategy maintains group coherence through thick formation, boundary enforcement, and the suppression or containment of philosophical inquiry that would dissolve the formation’s authority. It is evolutionarily robust but demands high costs from individuals who chafe against the constraints. The liberal philosophical strategy maximizes individual intellectual freedom by dissolving the thick formation in favor of universal principles that make no demands on specific communal practice. It produces extraordinary individual intellectual achievement but at the cost of the group cohesion that makes collective survival possible.
Strauss wanted both simultaneously and the evolutionary logic suggests this is not a stable position. He wanted a liberal political order robust enough to protect philosophical inquiry and specifically Jewish intellectual life, but he also recognized that liberalism’s tendency toward relativism and dissolution threatened both the political order and the Jewish community whose survival he cared about. His solution was to try to found liberalism on philosophical principles robust enough to resist this dissolution, which is the project of Natural Right and History. But Gottfried shows that this project failed on its own terms, because the liberal democracy Strauss sought to fortify has continued in the relativist and dissolving direction that Strauss warned against, and the Jewish community he cared about has continued to assimilate at rates that the Holocaust consciousness industry he enabled has not been able to reverse.
The Orthodox community’s evolutionary success relative to the liberal Jewish community is the empirical refutation of Strauss’s project. The Jews who maintained the thick formation, who paid the full cost of practice, who enforced the boundary maintenance mechanisms, who subordinated philosophical inquiry to communal formation, have been considerably more successful at surviving as Jews than the liberal Jewish intellectual class that Strauss’s project was designed to protect. Strauss wanted to make the world safe for the secular Jewish philosopher. The secular Jewish philosopher is disappearing through assimilation and intermarriage at extraordinary rates. The Orthodox community is growing. The evolutionary verdict is clear.
The Orthodox formation is demanding because it needs to be demanding to do what it does. The difficulty is not a bug but a feature. It is the cost of the formation, and paying the cost is what produces the formation. Strauss wanted the formation without the cost, which is not available. The liberal political order he sought to protect and fortify could provide freedom from persecution but it could not provide the thick communal formation that makes Jewish identity robust across generations. Only the practice itself can do that, and the practice demands exactly what Strauss was unwilling to pay.
Socrates did not seek a liberal political order that would leave him free to philosophize. He philosophized within the specific political order he inhabited and accepted its verdict when it turned against him. There is something more honest about that position than about Strauss’s, which wanted the philosophical freedom without the political risk, the Jewish formation without the religious practice, the authority of tradition without the submission it requires.
Alliance Theory argues that political belief systems are not coherent philosophical positions derived from abstract values but collections of propagandistic biases applied to whoever one’s current allies and rivals happen to be. The primary question Alliance Theory asks of any intellectual or political framework is not whether its arguments are philosophically valid but whose interests it serves, which coalition it maintains, and what propagandistic functions its specific claims perform. Applied to Strauss, this reframing is immediately productive.
Strauss presented his project as a recovery of timeless philosophical truth against the distortions of historicism, relativism, and positivism. Alliance Theory predicts this presentation is itself a propagandistic move. The claim to be recovering timeless truth rather than advancing coalition interests is what David Pinsof identifies as the characteristic move by which partisan advocacy presents itself as impartial philosophical inquiry. Strauss was performing exactly what Alliance Theory predicts partisans always perform, framing coalition interests as universal moral requirements, presenting the specific political needs of a specific community as the conclusions of disinterested philosophical analysis, and designating opposition to those conclusions as intellectual failure rather than as legitimate coalition disagreement.
The transitivity mechanism is the most analytically powerful tool Alliance Theory provides for understanding the specific shape of Strauss’s project.
Pinsof argues that people favor allies who share their allies and rivals, and that this transitivity logic explains the otherwise puzzling combinations of positions that characterize political belief systems. Strauss’s alliance structure had a very specific character that Alliance Theory maps with unusual precision. His primary allies were diaspora Jewish intellectuals, Anglo-American liberal democratic institutions, the Zionist project in Israel, and the Cold War anti-Soviet coalition. His primary rivals were German intellectual culture in its various manifestations, traditional Christianity as a potential source of antisemitism, the American Old Right with its nativist and particularist tendencies, and any intellectual framework that grounded political legitimacy in ethnic, cultural, or religious particularity rather than in universal rational principles.
The transitivity logic then explains features of Strauss’s thought that seem puzzling if taken at face value as pure philosophy. His elevation of Anglo-American liberal democracy as the best available political order was not a conclusion from philosophical analysis of political forms. It was the natural output of the alliance structure. Anglo-American liberal democracy was the framework within which his primary coalition was safest and most productive. His demonization of the specifically German intellectual tradition, the sustained assault on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Weber as the intellectual sources of political catastrophe, was not a conclusion from careful philosophical evaluation of those thinkers. It was the propagandistic rival-designation that the alliance structure required. Germany had been the site of the most extreme expression of what happened when the liberal political order that protected his coalition failed. Making German thought the source of that failure served the coalition’s interest in fortifying the Anglo-American alternative against similar collapse.
The perpetrator and victim bias mechanisms are clear in the Straussian intellectual operation.
Pinsof argues that people apply perpetrator biases to their rivals, attributing their transgressions to internal moral failures rather than external circumstances, and victim biases to their allies, emphasizing grievances and attributing disadvantages to external causes. Strauss applied both with systematic consistency. The perpetrator bias is most visible in his treatment of the Weimar Republic’s collapse and the subsequent Nazi catastrophe. The failure is attributed consistently to internal intellectual failures, to the spread of historicism and relativism and the specific intellectual traditions that produced them, rather than to the contingent economic and political circumstances of the interwar period. This attribution serves the coalition’s interest because it makes the catastrophe a consequence of wrong thinking that the right thinking can prevent, and it designates the specific intellectual traditions that are the coalition’s rivals as the source of the danger. The victim bias is most visible in Strauss’s treatment of the Jewish community’s situation, which is consistently framed as the consequence of external persecution rather than of anything internal to Jewish communal life or strategy, and in his treatment of liberal democracy’s vulnerabilities, which are attributed to external intellectual corruption rather than to any internal contradictions in the liberal project itself.
The attributional bias mechanism explains something Gottfried documents but does not fully analyze, which is the systematic attribution of good outcomes in the Western tradition to the Anglo-American inheritance and bad outcomes to the German and Continental inheritance. Strauss consistently credited the successes of liberal democracy to the internal virtues of its Lockean foundations and attributed its failures to the external contamination of German historicism and relativism. This is the attributional bias in its purest form, applying the standard that credits allies’ successes to their internal qualities and attributes allies’ failures to external causes, while reversing the attribution for rivals.
The self-deception mechanism is the most important contribution Alliance Theory makes to understanding Strauss specifically.
Pinsof argues, drawing on Trivers, that the propagandistic biases operate most effectively when the agent deploying them is unaware of their propagandistic character. The sincere partisan is more persuasive than the cynical one. The biases produce beliefs that feel like the conclusions of honest inquiry rather than like coalition service. Applied to Strauss this is analytically devastating, because it dissolves the distinction between the sincere philosopher and the coalition advocate without requiring a finding of bad faith. Strauss almost certainly believed he was engaged in philosophical recovery rather than coalition maintenance. His sincerity is not in question. But Alliance Theory predicts that this sincerity is itself a product of the propagandistic biases operating below the level of conscious awareness, generating conclusions that feel like philosophical insights while serving the alliance structure.
If Strauss were simply a cynical propagandist, the systematic coincidence between what the ancient texts turn out to secretly mean and what Strauss’s coalition interests required them to mean would be explained by deliberate manipulation. But Strauss was clearly not simply a cynical propagandist. He was a serious scholar. Alliance Theory explains this without requiring either cynicism or philosophical naivety. The propagandistic biases shaped what he found plausible in ancient texts, what he regarded as requiring explanation and what he regarded as natural, what he classified as the text’s surface meaning and what he classified as its hidden depth, without these shaping operations being conscious or deliberate. The decoder ring produced the same message every time not because Strauss was deliberately programming it but because his alliance formation had shaped his perceptual apparatus in ways that made certain readings feel like obvious recovery and others feel like naive surface reading.
The stochasticity argument adds something that neither Gottfried nor the other Strauss critics fully capture.
Pinsof argues that alliance structures are partly stochastic, that small variations in initial conditions feed on each other and snowball into seemingly arbitrary but self-reinforcing coalition structures. Applied to Strauss, this explains why his specific intellectual formation took the precise shape it did rather than some other shape that would have served similar coalition interests. The specific combination of Weimar Jewish intellectual culture, Jabotinsky Revisionist Zionism, the encounter with Schmitt and the concept of the political, the flight to England and the idolization of Churchill, the American success and the specific institutional context of the University of Chicago, all of these contingent factors shaped the specific form his coalition-serving intellectual project took. A different Strauss, formed by slightly different initial conditions, might have served the same coalition interests through a different intellectual framework. The specific form Straussianism took was not the necessary expression of the coalition’s interests but one contingent crystallization of them, which then became self-reinforcing as disciples adopted and elaborated it.
Alliance Theory’s Intolerance critique relates to Strauss’s claims about the ancient philosophers.
Pinsof argues that conservatives are not generally more intolerant but simply have different allies and rivals than liberals, and that measures of intolerance typically confound coalition-specific hostility with general psychological disposition. Applied to Strauss’s hermeneutics, this suggests that his claim to be recovering a universal philosophical tradition was itself a coalition-specific move that presented one community’s intellectual formation as the universal content of all serious philosophical inquiry. The ancient philosophers turned out, when properly decoded, to hold views remarkably compatible with the specific formation of a twentieth century German Jewish rationalist skeptic. Pinsof’s framework predicts exactly this result, not because Strauss was dishonest but because the alliance psychology automatically generates readings of available materials that confirm the coalition’s specific values and designate competing values as confused or naive.
The most interesting application of Alliance Theory to Strauss concerns the esoteric writing doctrine.
Pinsof argues that moral principles are not as principled as they appear, that they function primarily to mobilize support for allies and opposition to rivals rather than to express universal commitments. The esoteric writing doctrine is a perfect illustration of this. It presents itself as a universal hermeneutic principle, a general truth about how serious thinkers have always written, applicable to all texts in all periods. But its function is coalition-specific. It allows the coalition to claim the authority of the entire Western philosophical tradition for its specific positions by arguing that the surface meanings of those texts, which often do not support the coalition’s positions, conceal hidden meanings that do. Any text that on its surface supports religious belief, cultural particularity, or historical rootedness can be decoded as really expressing the rationalist skepticism and liberal universalism that the coalition requires. The doctrine immunizes itself against challenge by designating surface reading as naive and esoteric reading as sophisticated, making disagreement with the coalition’s decoded results evidence of the disagreer’s insufficient philosophical training rather than of the doctrine’s failure.
This is the propagandistic bias operating as an epistemological framework. It is not simply that Strauss applied the bias to specific texts. He constructed a general theory of reading that built the bias into the method itself, making it impossible in principle to recover a reading of major political philosophers that did not confirm the coalition’s specific values. The decoder ring was not just a convenient tool. It was institutionalized as the only legitimate tool, with alternative methods of reading designated as the intellectual failures of historicism, positivism, and naive surface reading.
That no tribe can afford to allow unlimited philosophical inquiry is the evolutionary version of this Alliance Theory point. Pinsof’s framework explains why at the individual psychological level. The tribe enforces its convenient beliefs through coalition mechanisms because those beliefs serve the coalition’s survival interests, and philosophical inquiry that threatens those beliefs is designated as dangerous, naive, or intellectually inadequate rather than as legitimate intellectual challenge. Strauss replicated this tribal enforcement mechanism within the academic philosophical community. Critics of the Straussian method were not engaged philosophically. They were designated as historicists, relativists, positivists, or insufficient readers. The tribal enforcement mechanism was being performed in the language of philosophical sophistication, but the underlying operation was identical to what tribes have always done with challenges to their foundational convenient beliefs.
The self-sealing character of the Straussian system is therefore not an accidental feature of a particular intellectual tradition. Alliance Theory predicts it as the normal output of coalition psychology operating in an intellectual domain. Every sufficiently coherent coalition produces an intellectual framework that presents its specific interests as universal truths, designates challenges to those interests as intellectual or moral failures, uses the propagandistic biases to find confirmation of its values in available cultural materials, and immunizes itself against empirical challenge by building the confirmation into the method of investigation itself. Strauss’s specific genius was to perform this standard coalition operation with unusual philosophical sophistication in ways that made the coalition maintenance function considerably less visible than it would have been in a less sophisticated operator.
The final contribution Alliance Theory makes is to explain why Strauss’s project failed on its own terms.
Pinsof argues that alliance structures are contingent and shifting, that the specific combination of allies and rivals that produces a particular belief system can and does change as historical circumstances change. Strauss built his intellectual project around a specific alliance structure that was relevant to the specific historical circumstances of a mid-twentieth century German Jewish intellectual refugee from Nazism operating in the context of the Cold War. When those circumstances changed, when the Cold War ended, when the specific threat of totalitarian antisemitism receded, when the alliance structure that made his specific combination of positions coherent dissolved, the intellectual project that served that alliance structure lost its internal logic. The Straussian movement continued to operate through institutional momentum, through the positions its members controlled in universities and publications, through the coalition enforcement mechanisms that had become habitual. But the alliance structure that gave those mechanisms their coherence and force had shifted, leaving the Straussian project as an increasingly brittle set of institutional positions without the original alliance logic that made them make sense.
That Strauss wanted the benefits without paying the price is therefore not just a character observation. It is a structural prediction that Alliance Theory makes about all coalition members who attempt to maintain the benefits of thick formation without the costs. The coalition provides intellectual authority, cultural depth, communal solidarity, and institutional support. But those benefits are produced by the formation costs, not available independently of them. Strauss wanted to maintain access to the authority of the Jewish tradition, the philosophical depth of the Western canon, the political security of liberal democracy, and the communal solidarity of the Jewish intellectual community, without paying the specific formation costs that each of those traditions requires from those who would inhabit them. Alliance Theory predicts this attempt will produce exactly what it produced in Strauss, a powerful and influential intellectual system that is ultimately hollow at its center because the formation that would have given it depth was replaced by propagandistic biases that produced the appearance of depth without the substance.
Leo Strauss’s decoder ring for discovering the true meaning of the ancient philosophers reminds me of the Jewish institutional projects decoded by Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life regarding the true meaning of the Holocaust, which just so happened to be whatever political agenda the activists wanted to pursue at the time. Both operations produce the same result regardless of the input. Feed any major political philosopher into the Straussian decoder and out comes a rationalist liberal skeptic who supports the conditions for secular Jewish intellectual life. Feed the Holocaust into the American Jewish organizational apparatus and out comes the identical political agenda, support for Israel, communal solidarity, suspicion of the surrounding culture, that the organizations would have pursued on other grounds if the Holocaust had never happened. The decoded message is already known before the decoding begins.
Novick makes this point obliquely but never quite states it this directly. He documents that Holocaust consciousness expanded precisely when the organizational need for it expanded, after 1967, when Israel’s international legitimacy was under pressure and American Jewish communal commitment was declining. The Holocaust did not produce the agenda. The agenda recruited the Holocaust. This is the decoder ring structure. The ancient text does not produce the Straussian reading. The Straussian formation recruits the ancient text to authorize a reading that was already settled.
What makes both operations work is the moral insulation each provides. Strauss’s decoder ring presents coalition advocacy as the recovery of timeless philosophical truth, placing it beyond the reach of ordinary political criticism. The Holocaust framework presents coalition advocacy as the only morally serious response to genocide, placing it beyond the reach of ordinary political criticism by a different route. In both cases the maneuver is the same. A source of enormous cultural authority, the Western philosophical canon in one case, the memory of the most extreme atrocity in modern history in the other, is recruited to authorize conclusions that were never actually derived from it.
In the 19th Century, Ellen G. White’s prophetic confirmation arrived reliably after the Seventh-day Adventist institutional decision required confirmation, not before it shaped the decision. The sequence matters. If Ellen White were receiving revelation, the prophecy would precede and constrain institutional choice. Instead, the institutional choice preceded and the prophecy followed, clothing the decision in divine authority after the fact.
This is the same structure as the Straussian decoder ring and the Holocaust consciousness apparatus. The conclusion precedes the evidence. The ancient philosopher turns out to endorse what the Straussian formation already required. The Holocaust turns out to teach exactly the political lessons the organizational apparatus already needed taught. Ellen White turns out to receive exactly the revelation that the General Conference already needed received. In each case the authorizing source, classical philosophy, genocide memory, divine prophecy, is recruited after the destination is already fixed.
What makes the SDA case particularly clean as an illustration is that the timeframe is compressed enough to be visible. Novick had to do serious archival work to establish that Holocaust consciousness expanded in response to organizational need rather than historical imperative. Gottfried had to trace Strauss’s alliance structure across decades to show that the decoded messages always matched the decoder’s formation. With Ellen White the sequence was sometimes observable within days, close enough that scholars could point to specific decisions followed by specific confirmations. The prophetic machinery was running fast enough to be caught in the act.
The deeper structural point is that all three operations require genuine believers to function. A cynical apparatus producing on-demand prophecy would be too visible to sustain. The Straussian who consciously knew he was projecting his formation onto Plato would be a fraud rather than a scholar. The organizational leader who consciously knew he was recruiting Holocaust memory to serve predetermined political ends would struggle to perform the necessary moral conviction. What makes each system powerful is that the people operating it believe they are doing something else, recovering truth, bearing witness, receiving revelation. Trivers and Pinsof together explain why this self-deception is not a personal failing but the normal output of the relevant psychology operating under the relevant institutional pressures.
